The Seven Deadly Sins--Greed

Been preaching on the Seven Deadly Sins—really interesting study. Just finished the sermon on greed. Here is a quote on greed from Clement of Alexandria, a second century theologian, that I found really interesting. I think that this was taken from a sermon he did from Mark 10 on the Rich Young Ruler. Clement notes that by making God your treasure we defeat the life stealing thief of greed. Here is what he says:

“For he who holds possessions and gold and silver and houses as gifts of God, and from them ministers to the salvation of men for God the giver, and knows that he possesses them for his brothers sakes rather than his own, and lives superior to the possession of them; who is not the slave of his possessions, and does not carry them about in his soul, nor limit and circumscribe his own life in them, but is ever striving to do some noble and divine deed; and who, if he is fated ever to be deprived of them, is able to bear their loss with a cheerful mind exactly as he bore their abundance—this is the man who is blessed by the Lord … a ready inheritor of the kingdom of heaven, not a rich man who cannot obtain life.”

Challenging thoughts. Greed is so much a part of our lives, we are completely unaware of it. 

You Gotta Get Along

People just don’t know how to get along. I mean, really! People don’t know how to talk to each other, don’t know how to be civil. Take, for example, the most recent tool for contlict—email. Some of the email messages people send out in the name of "caring" are horrific. I can’t imagine what they are thinking when they send them. But they do. Here’s a list of things to do to learn to get along. I’ll admit this is somewhat moralistic and doesn’t connect to the reason behind the reason for the list, but that’s for another post. You do the following, you’ll be better able to get along—with anybody!

Don’t send complaints to people via email—EVER! You’ll be more likely to be nice in a phone conversation or face to face and you’ll probably get better results too.

When you find yourself upset, ask, “How did I contribute to this?” If you are really brave, ask someone who knows you well to help you understand. But count the cost. If you are married, your spouse will be more than happy to tell you. I guarantee it.

Listen well. Don’t assume you know whats going on. You probably don’t. In fact, repeat back to others what you hear them saying. Most of us love to talk and we’re lousy at listening. More often than not people need to be cared for, empathized with, and heard. This takes a lot of maturity because some of the conflict we experience has little to do with our actions towards another and a lot to do with their perspective.

Realize that your perspective is your perspective and that’s it. You have only a part of the truth of what happened. This is hard to communicate to those who think that “they are right.”

People really do bad things. You do bad things. So be careful to not be overly judgmental. Another thought along these lines would be that people do what they do for reason. Try to figure it out and you'll often solve the conflict. 

Hang on to yourself. By that I mean that even people of faith, who believe that they are created in the image of God, have a uniqueness to them that reflects that image differently from anyone else. Some conflict has to do with differences with reference to that uniqueness, that others cannot reconcile with, and will invariably attach moral attributes to. Be careful here. And don’t read behind the lines. I'm not trying to hide anything in this sentence. Keep this in mind: sameness doesn’t equal intimacy. Think about that for a while. It could change your life. The conflicts I’ve often seen in church are not so much over issues of morality, as issues of culture or difference or preference.

Submission doesn’t mean subservience. By that I mean that being submissive to authority doesn’t mean you’ll do what those in authority tell you to do all the time. For example, the boss or your husband or your wife doesn’t have the right to tell you to do something wrong. Its not submission, biblical or otherwise, to do evil in the name of resolving conflict. For that reason, sometimes truly solving a conflict feels like conflict. Which leads to another thought….

Disrupt the false peace. You read it right. There is a peace that is a false peace. That peace isn’t peace at all but conflict disquised as peace. Disrupt it. If you are at a restaurant with a group of people and you order $20 worth of food and others order $40 worth of food and someone comes up with the bright idea to “split the tabe equally” then say, “Nope. I’ll pay $20 and that’s that.” You’ll have disrupted the false peace and maybe even created an argument but you’ve resolved a conflict. There are miriads of these kinds of examples.

If you are uptight with someone, go talk to them. Don’t go talk to someone else unless that person is needed to help you gain perspective. To bring someone else into the conflict is called Triangulation and its death. Run from it.

When talking to others say something like this, “Help me to understand the reason you….” Then listen. Nine out of ten times the conflict will be resolved.

If that doesn’t resolve it then say, “I notice….. and I feel…..I’d prefer….. Then you let them respond. By putting things in the “I” you’ve taken away much of the ugly attack that comes when people say, “You did….” This is tough to do and demands maturity. Good luck.

If they won’t negotiate a solution, or even acknowledge a problem, and you are in authority, then you use your authority to address the issue. If you have no authority to address the issue further, avoid escalation by holding firm to the scerenity prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Lots of conflict is rooted so deep in people’s lives and cannot be resolved apart from an act of God. I’ve come to accept this in recent years.

Much of this comes straight out of the Bible. But there is a lot of common sense things that people can do to make relationships work. The bottom line is this, because Jesus resolved our deepest conflict—the conflict we have with a holy God--those of us who are Christians can too. That’s the bottom line. But for everyone else, these simple guidelines (which are coming off the top of my head at this writing and which I’ll update on occasion) can work quite nicely. Peace!

Judgement Day

I saw the large bill board first in downtown Boston, the weekend of the marathon. JUDGMENT DAY—it declared. May 21, 2011. At first I thought it was a rock group, then I noticed the sponsors tag: Family Radio, neatly along the bottom and assumed it was a conference on May 21. It wasn’t until I got home to New York and saw that the world was going to end at 6:00 pm Eastern time on May 21, that I realized what was happening. “Here we go again,” I thought. “More fodder for those who think of evangelicals as losers and lunatics.”

Doomsday prophets like Harold Camping, the progenitor of the recent Judgement Day scare, have been around for a long time. In the middle part of the 19th century William Miller predicted that Jesus would return sometime between October 21, 1843 and October 21, 1844. They are still waiting. Millers followers eventually became what we now call the Seventh Day Adventists. He has about a half a page description of his sect in Kenneth Latourette’s 1500 page tome on church history. The failure of Christ to return then became known as the Great Disappointment. I’m sure Campings supporters feel a similar set of emotions now. According to the New York Times, people quit their jobs, quit saving college tuition for their kids, and came to New York to usher in the Rapture. In their minds there was no better place to do it than in Grand Central Station where they were lined up in the passage ways near the underground trains challenging people to repent! According to my daughter, they were pretty aggressive. I bet money that Camping will come out and say he got the math wrong and they’ll start the campaign all over again!

To me it’s a no brainer. The scripture says, “The secret things belong to God” and God alone (Deut 29:29)! There is mystery and transcendence in this faith we call Christianity. When people start putting dates on the return of Christ or speaking with absolute confidence about the nature and scope of events like the rapture, they cross a line as far as I’m concerned. Millions of dollars were spent on advertising something Jesus himself said no one will ever know (Mark 13:34). In fact, in his incarnational earthly presence, Jesus, himself didn’t know!

So what can we know theologically for sure? Jesus is going to come back some day and restore all things and part of that involves judgment (Acts 3:21). If you are a Christian, you believe at least that. It’s pretty basic I admit, and not near as sexy as JUDGEMENT DAY. But that is what Christians believe! And we believe it because of revelation—the Bible. We don’t believe it because we can mathmatically figure it out. There is an element of faith in any worldview including secular Atheism. All of us bank our eternal destiny on some faith based belief system. I’m a Christian because Christianity makes sense more than any other world religion. I’m not a Christian because I can prove definitively that the resurrection took place or that the bible is inspired or that God created by the simple command of his voice or that Jesus is coming back. Simply put, Christianity is different. God enters our world and does for us something we can’t do for ourselves. He dies a death we should have died and lives a life we should have lived. By faith in Jesus righteous record we avoid the negative side of judgment day—whenever it happens! There is no other world religion like it. And while I think that there are many good reasons to believe in Jesus and his message, I also realize that ultimately, it’s a faith based belief system. There is no bomb proof truth in this life! The only one who knows truth objectively is God himself.

I hope that as the world snickers, Christians will be sobered; sobered by the reality that lives are seriously disrupted, perhaps even ruined, by Mr. Campings disregard for the clear teaching of scripture. I believe in a judgment day and it is something we should take seriously. But how I as a follower of Jesus present Jesus and his message of hope and redemption will do as much to promote the cause of Christ as wreck it. Perhaps Mr. Camping should take his judgment day belief system seriously and re-evaluate his own wreckless behavior. In the end, he may find that the finger of God’s just judgment pointed at him. And that is a scary thought!

Addendum: After writing this blog, but prior to posting it Harold Camping came out with the new date for the rapture and judgment: October 21, 2011—my wife’s birthday. I think I'll take her out on the 20th! (Just kidding)

Do you really teach that stuff?

I had an interesting conversation with a member of the Alley Pond running club last Saturday night. We were at a dinner dance and awards ceremony and over the meal I was asked, “So what do you do?” The question comes up often, as in any conversation, but even more often when I tell people that I work in Hawaii on a regular basis. They seem to want to know what kind of cushy job I must have that takes me 6000 miles away in paradise. I don’t like telling people I’m a pastor. They start to treat me differently. They quit swearing in front of me—unless of course I swear in front of them which then gives them permission to be themselves but Jan says it isn’t classy and I agree so I try not to do it. But on this occasion I swallowed hard and told the truth. Part of this was motivated by the fact that I was sitting next to a friend who knew the truth so I couldn’t fudge. “I’m a pastor, and I work in churches in transition and this one happens to be in Hawaii. I work on a team.” The guy asking the question was great and began to philosophize on his religious upbringing. He was incredibly gracious and an interesting person. But then towards the end of the conversation he said, “So, I mean, do you really teach this stuff literally, the Bible, after all this is 2008?” I’d heard the question before and didn’t know exactly how to answer on this occasion, but I said something like this, “Absolutely! We believe that you can’t make up the Jesus of the New Testament. The tendency we have today is to drag Jesus down to our eye ball level so we feel comfortable with him. That Jesus won’t change your life. He’s just like you. We believe in the Jesus who really lived, died, and rose from the dead, the Jesus who claimed to be God. That Jesus will confront you when you screw up and comfort you when you feel bad about yourself. The New Testament is very different from much of what we see in religion today. In the Bible, God moves towards us. He pursues us. And we let that gospel, that good news, inform how we live. It touches every facet of our lives from how we handle racism, to conflict, to our money. We definitely teach the bible literally in the churches we work in.” His response to my explanation seemed to be one of genuine interest and respect.

For me personally as a Christ follower, I can’t pick and choose the commands that I want to keep. If Jesus is who he claimed to be then when he says, “Don’t lie” or “Don’t sleep around” that doesn’t mean I can do it now because it’s 2008. “Don’t murder” and “Love your brothers as yourself” is also something he commanded us. If that hasn’t changed, why have the other harder and inconvenient commands, changed? If Jesus is Lord, it doesn’t matter what he tells us to do or not to do. He has the final say. That’s my take on it.